Jack.
How long had I been cleaning?
He wasn’t in a suit jacket. Just a navy button-down, sleeves rolled to his elbows, top button undone like he’d gotten and ran out the door without looking back. His tie was shoved into his pocket. His jaw was tight.
His eyes scanned the wreckage. The overturned chairs. The scattered papers. Me.
“You look like hell,” he said softly.
I let out something between a laugh and a scoff. “I’ve had better Thursdays.”
He stepped further inside, his expression grim in a way that stripped all pretence. “I heard.” He hesitated, glanced toward the jagged glass and overturned furniture. “Everyone’s talking.”
“Can’t look great for you,” I said, bitter around the edges of exhaustion. “Running back to the place you just left under a cloud of disaster.”
Jack didn’t flinch.
“I don’t give a shit about optics,” he said. His voice was quiet. Steel wrapped in velvet. “I care about her.”
Something in my chest pulled taut, sharp enough to hurt.
“She’s gone, Jack.” My throat burned as I said it. “They took her.”
His jaw locked. “I know Ava, and we’re going to get her back.”
He said it like fact. Like a promise. Like gospel.
And God, I wanted to believe him.
“Do you have the backup files?” he asked, already moving toward the desk, scanning the chaos like his mind was ten steps ahead. “Everything you and Remi found, the flagged records, the altered paperwork, the footage?”
I reached for the hidden drawer beneath the counter and pulled out the small black external drive we’d started loading before the raid.I handed it over carefully, like it was the most fragile thing in the world.
“We didn’t get to finish,” I said. “Some of the logs were already tampered with.”
“We’ll trace it,” he said. His voice was all clipped precision now, prosecutor mode engaged. “Piece by piece. Everything she touched, everything she didn’t. We’ll follow the trail.”
“And then?” I asked, my voice quieter than I meant it to be. “What happens when you find her fingerprints on something she didn’t touch?”
Jack finally met my eyes. “Then we burn whoever put them there. Whoever is working with her.”
I blinked, and for a second, I didn’t see the prosecutor.
I saw the man who once told Remi she was the best thing that ever happened to his moral compass.
The man whom I knew deep down still loved her.
He tucked the drive into his bag and adjusted the strap across his chest. “Let’s finish cataloguing what we can,” he said. “Then we’ll go see Remi.”
The thought made me nauseous, but I nodded anyway.
That’s when the knock came.
Sharp against the splintered frame.
I turned, expecting another officer. Or a reporter.
Instead, it was Margie from the sandwich shop down the street.
